Seeking a caffeine boost
CAFÉ culture may be quintessentially Italian, but it took an American firm to make it global. Howard Schultz says visiting Milan and its cafés in the 1980s inspired him to develop Starbucks into what it is today. More than three decades later, the Seattle coffee giant is poised to enter the Italian market itself. On February 26th Mr Schultz announced a deal with Percassi, a retail developer, to open the chain’s first location in the country next year, in Milan.
Starbucks is not the only firm to have stolen a march. An Italian developed the first espresso machine, but a Swiss firm, Nestlé, conquered the market for personal espresso-makers with its Nespresso system. The world’s second- and third-largest coffee groups, which merged in 2015 to create Jacobs Douwe Egberts, were American and Dutch, respectively.
Last year Lavazza, Italy’s biggest coffee firm, bought Douwe Egberts’ Carte Noire premium brand for €800m ($870m), making it the market leader in France. That followed an initial public offering of 40% of Massimo Zanetti, to raise capital for expansion. Zanetti owns a score of brands, including Boncafé, an Asian roaster; and it is buying a stake in Club Coffee, a Canadian firm with which it has developed compostable capsules. Besides continuing to develop its business-to-business side, Illycaffé is expanding its younger direct-to-consumer arm. It has opened flagship coffee shops in big cities, from Seoul to San Francisco, and plans to open more.Italy’s coffee firms are trying to grab more of the global industry for themselves. Italy’s re-exports of beans, mostly roasted, have more than doubled over the past decade, to the equivalent of 3.2m standard 60kg sacks, increasing their share of global trade from 6.7% to 8.9%.
Jeffrey Young of Allegra World Coffee Portal, a consulting firm, doubts if all this is enough in what has become a highly competitive and consolidated market. Many Italian firms have rested on their laurels, he says, believing their product to be superior. That was once true, but the emergence of coffee-shop chains, and then of craft coffee brands, has changed that. Quality is now a given; branding and the ambience of coffee shops are ever more important.
The industry is now in the grip of a fad for the “science” of coffee-making—improved grinding methods, better monitoring of water quality, and so on. Illycaffé was an early innovator, having pioneered the use of pressurised cans when most others were still selling coffee in paper bags. More recently it has created an app that lets coffee-lovers design and buy their ideal blend—it will be rolled out in some of the firm’s shops later this year. But if innovation and product development continue to be important routes to growth, even Italy’s biggest firms may be outgunned by global giants with much deeper pockets.

Comentário---------
A cadeia global de valor, advinda da globalização e capacidade de informação, tem proporcionado cada vez mais, maior capacidade e estruturação das cadeias de suprimentos.
Além de toda evolução tecnológica, percebe-se que esta evolução leva principalmente a duas consequências pontuais, uma que pode ser vista do lado do consumidor, e a outra do lado da empresa.
 Os serviços e produtos específicos de um local e cultura, estão cada vez mais acessíveis globalmente,  acarretando em um gosto - de pessoas de diferentes culturas - cada dia mais parecidos, como no caso do café dito na matéria. O  café italiano, graças ao Starbucks, pode ser encontrado em São Paulo, Califórnia, ou em pleno Tókio Plaza, shopping tradicional japonês.
Esta demanda global, faz com que haja a possibilidade de uma expansão da marca fora das fronteiras nacionais. A empresa pode entrar em outros países com diferentes estratégias e posicionamentos, devido a uma serie de fatores como competidores, aspectos políticos, econômicos e culturais diferentes ao ambiente e estrutura nacional. Essa característica, pode ser facilmente percebida na matéria escolhida, dando o exemplo da empresa Lavazza, maior firma de café do mundo que abriu diferentes marcas na França, Asia e Canadá. 
Espera-se dessa forma que características particulares e especificas de um produto sejam cada vez mais encontradas com maior facilidades não apenas no país de origem mas nos grandes centros econômicos mundiais, tornando os produtos e gostos cada vez mais parecidos mas ao mesmo tempo peculiares.